Breaking into the Mississippi Senate Race

How do three campaign officials come to be discovered locked in a courthouse—one in which primary precinct returns are also locked—in the middle of the night? Put differently, can the race for the Mississippi Republican Senate nomination look any more like playground pretense of what a political campaign should be?

The story here starts with a primary race between Thad Cochran, who has been in the Senate for thirty-six years, and a Tea Partier, Chris McDaniel; each got about forty-nine per cent of the primary vote, forcing a runoff in three weeks. And yet this campaign has veered away from health-care reform to trespassing. Weeks before the courtroom night visitors, a blogger who supported McDaniel made his way into a nursing home to get pictures of Cochran’s wife, who suffers from dementia. (The campaign said that it didn’t send him and doesn’t like what happened.) Two cases of unauthorized entry in one race, which isn’t even at the general-election stage yet, does seem like a lot.

The courthouse, in Hinds County, was locked up at 11:30 PM. The three people on McDaniel’s team—Janis Lane, who is on the board of the Central Mississippi Tea Party; Scott Brewster, who used to work for Newt Gingrich and is now part of the McDaniel campaign; and Rob Chambers, of the Mississippi Baptist Christian Action Commission, who has worked with McDaniel—were extracted by the sheriff at 3:45 AM. The reasonable explanation for this? “There are conflicting stories from the three of them, which began to raise the red flag, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” Othor Cain, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, told the Sun-Herald. (He added that no one had been charged with anything, pending an investigation.)

McDaniel’s campaign said, a little hazily, that its people went into the courthouse “through an open door after being directed by uniformed personnel,” then discovered that they were “locked inside the building. At this point they sat down and called the county Republican chairman, a close Cochran ally, to help them get out.” This suggests that, say, a door closed behind them; if so, it did so with tectonic slowness, since the County Chairman says that he was called after 2 AM. Perhaps there was something in the courthouse that caused time to stand still, or seem to run in reverse. (The ballots from the primary were said to be in a vault and so, presumably, secure; it’s unclear what other records were accessible.) At any rate, Cain, the sheriff’s spokesman, told the Clarion-Ledger, “It’s a fabrication that someone pointed them to a door.… None of our guys let anybody in.” Mississippi is a magical place.

The invasion of the nursing home is sadder and sourer. Cochran is seventy-six years old. His wife, Rose, whom he married in 1964, has been in Saint Catherine’s Village, a nursing home, for fourteen years, and suffers from dementia; according to press reports, she is confined to her bed by her illness. That is the rawest sort of exposure. A blogger named Clayton Kelly somehow got in and took pictures of her, for a video he posted on YouTube. (It’s since been taken down.) There was no allegation, even remotely, that Cochran was allowing her to be cared for improperly, or that she was being confined in some “Jane Eyre”-style attic. The point, if one could call it that, is that Cochran’s assistant sometimes travels with him on trips related to his Senate work. The assistant, as the Times noted, in a story on the incident, is seventy-six years old. Cochran’s spokesman, quoted in the Clarion-Ledger, called the questions about her travel “sexist,” saying that they wouldn’t be asked about a man who, like Cochran’s assistant, has worked in a Senate office for more than thirty years.

Cohran has run an ad attacking the McDaniel campaign for its association with the nursing-home pictures. (Narrator: “It’s the worst!”) It then quickly notes that he’s been endorsed by the N.R.A. “and voted against Obamacare more than one hundred times.” Cochran got about a thousand fewer votes than McDaniel. (There is a Democrat, too, named Travis Childers; the Times, in a piece on Thursday, said that the party was glad, in a general way, for the G.O.P. fight—no one really thought he could win. This is Mississippi.)

The courtroom and the nursing home are just two fixed points in a meandering campaign. There is also what might be called “Mamacita”-gate (use of that phrase is apparently part of McDaniel’s advice for picking up women); Cochran’s failure to address his supporters on primary night; the odd question of whether Katrina aid counts when you say that you hate federal spending (Gail Collins notes the oddness of both candidates hating government and liking, for example, the cotton subsidies that benefit Mississippi); and McDaniel’s outrage at the Cochran campaign for calling him a trial lawyer. He helpfully addresses that one on his campaign Web site’s F.A.Q.:

Is Chris a trial lawyer?

No. Quite the contrary. Chris has been a leader for conservative legal causes for years, including helping to lead Mississippi’s legal fight against Obamacare that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In his legal practice, Chris McDaniel almost exclusively defended companies and people AGAINST frivolous law suits.

So, the “contrary” of being a trial lawyer is being someone who leads a legal fight against Obamacare, and defends companies and people in law suits. What sort of courthouses do the trials for those lawsuits take place in? The kind a person gets locked inside, late into the night?